Fabulous fennel

Slow-cooked fennel with puy lentils

Makes: enough for 4 adults
Takes: 1 hour cooking time, 20 minutes active preparation time

Ingredients

4 fennel bulbs
Fennel rub:
1/4 c olive oil
1 large clove garlic, microplaned
juice and zest of 1 lemon
1 T fennel seeds
1 T dried thyme
salt and pepper
Lentils:
500 g green puy lentils
6 c water
1 T maple syrup
100 g (or very generous handful) basil leaves
jar of sundried tomatoes
50 g pan-roasted walnuts
fennel fronds
dried chilli flakes
salt and pepper

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180°C.

2. Prepare fennel rub by grinding 1 T fennel seeds, 1 T dried thyme and salt and pepper in a mortar and pestle. Then add 1/2 c olive oil and 1 large clove of garlic (microplaned) and zest of 1 lemon.

3. Trim fronds and hard end from fennel roots, keep fronds. Cut each in half. Marinate with fennel rub, pouring any excess oil over the fennel and packing into a baking tray. Cook in the oven for around 1 hour until the fennel is soft when pricked with a knife. The bottoms will have gone brown and caramelised.

4. Around 25 minutes before you wish to serve the dish, cook 500 g puy lentils with 6 cups of water in a saucepan on the stove top. After 20 minutes, check that cooked (they should be al dente) and drain any excess water.

5. Meanwhile, chop the sundried tomatoes, draining and discarding any oil, and chop basil leaves and most of the fennel fronds. Chop walnuts and roast on a low heat in a heavy-bottomed frying pan for 5-10 minutes, watching closely to make sure they don’t burn.

6. Add the herbs, sundried tomatoes and walnuts to the lentils (in their saucepan) with 1 T maple syrup, a swig of olive oil and the juice of the lemon, along with pepper and salt and a sprinkle of dried chilli flakes. Stir well. Reserve a few walnuts and the remaining fennel fronds as a garnish.

7. Serve the lentils in bowls, each topped with two roasted half fennel, a few roasted walnuts, chilli flakes and a few fennel fronds.

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The story behind the recipe…

Friends often ask where I get the inspiration to write week after week. The answer is that I always choose a vegetable and go from there. That vegetable has to be available, and preferably Dutch-grown, which means it is truly seasonal. This week, I went looking for inspiration at a local community garden. There were avenues of flowers, lots of lettuces, herbs and cucumbers, all of which I’ve already written about. Then there were tomatoes and eggplants still with tiny flowers on their plants, waiting for July to come into their own. I was at a loss. What early Summer vegetable could I still write about?

I did a once around the garden and then another round, looking more closely and was suddenly captured by a single row of fennel roots, each planted at an angle to the next one, some of the fronds turning a little yellow with the heat. There was something so pleasing about their symmetry, the layered fennel folded like a kimono, each turned away from the other slightly, as if to keep its own secrets. Right, I said to myself, I will do fennel this week.

I found fennel at the local organic shop and bought a few pantry staples along with them, then cycled home, mulling ideas. Pasta with roasted fennel? It would be delicious, but can pasta with roasted tomato sauce really be beaten? What could I serve the fennel with? I thought about sweet potato, about polenta, or rice. Fennel wasn’t a meal on its own. Fennel needed something earthy to accompany it, something that wouldn’t overwhelm its gentle flavour. It wasn’t till I got home and unpacked the bag of green puy lentils that the answer looked at me. I felt the same tingle I’d felt when I’d seen the line of fennel growing in the garden. Puy lentils and cooked fennel. Of course.

Here’s another photo from the community garden on what was truly a spectacular Dutch summer day. The flowers were out in all their glory and were absolutely buzzing with bees. The garden is next to a school and framed by old trees that give it some height. You can apply for a plot there, which I did at Christmas time last year, but they always have many more requests than they have places and I wasn’t pulled from the lottery. What is fabulous about the garden is that the kids from the school next door also have their own plots. There is a concerted effort for children in this country to learn about where their food comes from, and to have the chance to grow their own, which I think is so important. I’ll never forget a Parisian friend once telling me that she’d never seen a lemon tree until she was on holiday in Italy in her early 30s. In New Zealand, you could find lemon trees in almost every backyard when I was growing up. The idea that she had never seen a lemon tree was absolutely baffling. But that is what it is to grow up in inner-city Paris.

A short post this week, but I hope the beautiful flowers make up for it, and the recipe, which is A+. My partner said he’d never had better fennel in his life and, unlike me, he is not one prone to exaggeration, so I’d take his word for it if I were you.

Till next week.

Amelia.